Like

This is rather uncanny and unexpected if comparing to the later works of Ali Smith. Honestly, I love her seasonal quartet and also the later novels like How to be Both, which I sought this resemblance of a parallel timeline of perspective in Like. To me, this novel sets the basal value of how her works would slowly develop into, the mingling of space and time, all in a blur within an aesthetic air.
Yet, comparatively, as her debut novel, I couldn't see anything that distinguishes itself or stands itself out from other authors' debuts. What a pity that is, as with my expectation, this fulfills none of what I anticipated. For a debut novel, it has its absolute virgin parts, raw, refreshed, with the telling of a sad tale where in the end there attaches the ending by the merely interweaving pattern of Amy and Ash. For sure, the novel itself is indeed a work of art, how the author deliberately penned and planned them out one by one. There are shadows cast around the novel, where you can pick them up piece by piece of how her prose style is, even be seen in her later works. One thing I would like to mention is how this twin story is again remade in How to be Both. But it didn't give me the chills and thrills and the poetic and beautiful prose in How to be Both. All clamped into a book, fit into that volume of 350 pages, I felt exhausted to flip through the pages with this long, dreadful, unnecessarily informative narration, especially for which appeared in the second half of the novel. The relationship of the two friends are being narrated in a more lucid and clear manner in the second part, which makes the novel loses its balance when it comes to how the implicit nature of the friendship of Amy and Ash is being portrayed. I am not utterly disappointed with Like, yet I hope to see something that could grasp my attention a bit harder when I go back for Ali Smith's works again.